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Lima, the otter’s stories

Lima likes to hold hands

Gold dusted champagne is her favourite and she is Nolita Phenara. She is a peculiar little butterfly of a girl and her friend, Kirin Kichua is a dragonfly of a boy. They wasp in and out of each other’s minds, having six different conversations at the same time.

They have a caramel coloured pet, a baby otter. His name is Lima and he loves holding paws with anyone who cares to hold his paw.

Nolita downs her glass of gold dust, all at once. She wasps with Kirin about the light on this side of the marble like frozen lakes of Nila, a little place near no where important. But a little place that is home.

Lima’s holding a twig

Nolita, like the long line of Phenarans before her, belonged to a group called the Thumpers. They held steady, the rhythm of the world, with their ‘thumps’. They held gravity in place, kept the waves to a beat and ensured that all the sand particles in the world, collectively, stayed a finite number.

On this new moon night, like several others that came before it, Phenarans gathered on the frozen lakes of Nila.

They sat shoulder to shoulder, in no particular order and bent their slender necks to face the colourlessness of Nila. They closed their translucent eyelids over fiery irises and thumped the ice with closed fists.

And the Kichuans, the group that Kirin was born into, hummed. The Kichuans scattered themselves amidst the Phenerans. They silently wasped with each other to pick one hum, out of their collection of 3462 hummables for this night.

What’s interesting is that the Kichuans didn’t really have to hum. Their singing did not add or take from the Phenerans’ thumping. But, they did hum and it made for a beautiful combination of sounds.

Of such beauty, that Lima, the caramel coloured pet otter slid up to the closest Pheneran, held on to her hand and went to sleep – never mind the possible imbalance in the world’s granules of sand.

The Phenerans thumped right up until dull old Nila lit up with a fire beneath its frozen surface. The deep yellows, oranges and reds did not start slow but burst into great, awful and untamable life. The flames shimmered beneath the glimmering surface throwing broken reflections of light onto the Phenarans’s faces. These reflections resembled the Phenerans’ own irises.

The fire was a sign that the world had absorbed the rhythm and it would dull over the next few days and nights until the next new moon, by when Nila would become her dull, colourless self. Now, the Thumpers were free to leave and the Kichuans could rest their throats.

Lima did not notice the dispersal and continued to sleep, he woke to find himself holding onto a slender twig that the Pheneran had placed in Lima’s hand.